At peace.

She turned to us, her brown hands covered in chalk, and she said "You have to use this class to write about something happy." Then after a short pause she added "Happy. Blissful. Even if it's small and fleeting. Happy."

I put my head down on the wooden desk. We had our classes in the primary section of a school and the we had outgrown the benches more than a decade before. The walls were papered with drawings of lopsided flowers and enthusiastic diagrams of water cycle manufactured rain. One chart said "Star performer" and Mohan had a lot of paper stars shining bright next to him.

I am not good at writing about happy things. I try but I end up sounding plastic. My teacher says my best work is about regret and she hopes that doesn't reflect on my real life. Don't we all import things from our own little worlds to make our stories work?

She may have sensed this, because when she passed by my desk, she whispered, "write about the last time you felt really at peace."

The last time I felt really at peace was a couple of weeks ago. I was at your place, sitting on the floor. We were eating Chinese food. You were on the bed, a little beyond my reach, and you put on something to watch on your laptop. The laptop screen was at an uncomfortable angle and all the characters seemed bathed in odd shades of green and red.I didn't say anything because I was exhausted from a long day and full from all the food. The voices of the characters, crisp repartee by who I am sure are excellent writers, filled the space interspersed with your laughter and the clatter of steel cutlery. At one point when I started to doze off, you patted my arm. I looked up and thought you wanted me to pass something. You didn't want anything passed. It was just a stray pat that meant nothing in particular. Pats do that, they don't have to be loaded with hidden clues to some secret emotion.
At that point, I felt warm and comfortable. And happy, yes. It was nothing. It was a non-event, non-special, non-noteworthy time. A regular sleepover with food from our regular place.

I turned in this paper and left the class earlier than everyone else.

We are far apart. Atleast in my mind, we are.

 If we were kids, I'd picture us standing on terraces miles away from each other, looking up at the sky, and blowing soap bubbles. It is a little hard to imagine you blowing soap bubbles, but it seemed more interesting than saying standing and staring at the sky.

We used write to each other, high pitched bursts of conversation but that has become watered down a little. The animated descriptions have given way to quiet, matter of fact sentences. The hellos no longer have a hint of laughter. We are growing up. And it isn't a bad thing, and it's definitely something that has been written about to the death, but it's true. Sometimes it's upsetting. Sometimes it's not.

If we were kids, we wouldn't read the same books, I'd colour my people in blue and you'd not colour at all. Or maybe you would, but there wouldn't be any way for me to find out.

"I am alone."

"Everyone feels they're alone at some point. And maybe they are. Is that so bad?"

He wipes his sweaty hands on a paper napkin bearing the logo of a Chinese restaurant. I imagine him eating there with someone, maybe even a first date. I imagine his eyes filling up with laughter while some girl with long hair tells him stories over kung pao chicken and cold noodles. 

"Which restaurant is that napkin from?"

"China hut. You've been?"

"No."

I am sitting in his living room, watching him watch TV. It's late Friday morning and the rains have bathed the city clean. But I don't like going out around noon because schools let out and the roads are filled with children and mothers and blue school buses that rush around the city depositing one knock kneed kid after another to his or her home. 

"I think I am not made to be by myself. I think I need to be around people, even if we are just sitting there silently." 

"You are more anxious about the thought than the actual situation. You've lived alone plenty of times and you always tell me how much you enjoy coming home to quiet rooms and roaming around in just your socks."

"Living alone is not the same as being alone."

"In that case, you're really not alone."

We're silent for a bit and then he stands up. He walks over to the other side of the room and starts going through a pile of clothes.

"I should leave, I forgot you have plans." 

"You're welcome to come with. As long as you like sci-fi movies."

"No, no you carry on. Have fun."

He turns and looks at me and I suddenly feel like I'm a bug under a microscope. Where he will dissect and analyze parts of me. Dry hair, funny nose, average chin. Regular eyes with a hint of fear. Subject seems nervous.

"What?" I touch my mouth as though checking for food between my teeth.

"Nothing."

"Why are winding yourself up, this much? Did something happen?"

"No. I told you. I just feel alone."

"How can you feel alone, when I am right here?"

"You aren't right here, you are on your way out."

"Okay. You're being a little dramatic. We spent the entire morning here. In this room. You said you wanted to talk, we talked, we ate muffins and we watched TV. Most people call this a pleasant time with friends."

"Okay. I am sorry I'm being dramatic."

He sighs. Audibly. Like he is looking for a non verbal way to tell me how this is trying.

"Please just go home, and take a nap. In the evening when you wake up, go for a walk or a cup of coffee or to a book store. You'll be fine. To be honest you're fine right now, you just choose to think not."

He leaves me standing in the middle of his room, and I knows he is right. Feeling alone and lonely and similar emotions are luxuries afforded to those of us with time and spare feelings to be allocated to non essential areas like these. 

When I get home, I fall into a long long spell of sleep and when I wake up, it is dark outside and dark inside the room. I hear voices in the distance but their conversations are gibberish. I walk through each room wearing long striped socks but the house is absolutely quiet. The voices in the distance had dissolved into silence. 

I feel like the wind is trapped inside me - she said. She was standing in the middle of my room, wearing an oversized work shirt and socks.

By the time I could focus on what she was saying, dragging my thoughts away from the computer, she was walking towards me. She looked like a pretty scarecrow, her hair stood on her head, like someone intended to hack it all off but got bored mid way through the activity.

Can you hear it? - she asked, and moved her torso to my ear. I put my arm around her waist, it was like holding a child. I pressed my ear against her warm skin, through the thin shirt. She smelled of the big blue bottle of lotion on the table.

"I can't hear anything." I said and smiled.

You aren't trying hard enough. - She said, her voice fraying at the edges.

Then she sat on my bed and looked at me, her face revealing no emotion.

"Want something to eat?" I asked and started to walk out of the room. A time had come where I couldn't stay around her for too long. I think the word that would fit here is unsettling.

I know she mumbled her answer, but her No followed me to the kitchen and watched me make a sandwich.
I wasted time in the kitchen, eating my sandwich and washing plates that were already cleaner than they needed to be.
After an hour or so, I returned to my room. She was standing in front of the mirror, knotting a scarf around her neck. She had on a sweater that used to fit her like they had her in mind when they made it. Now, it hung on her, like loose skin that's going to die.

I am going - she said and I asked her where because I was alarmed. This was how most of our fights in the past had started, where she would threaten to leave in the middle of the night and I would be caught between hoping she left so I could sleep in peace and begging her to wait because she'd get mugged or killed alone at a time like that.

But the fights were all gone. We were left with some kind of an empty sound, which was the sound you hear inside empty cupboards after all its contents have been packed away, and you poke your head inside it to check if anything is left behind.

I just have to not be here - she said, and picked up her bag. "Did I do something to tick you off?" I asked.

No.

"Okay. Is there anything I can do to make you stay?" I asked.

Then she turned and looked straight at me, her chin quivering. I walked towards her, ready to put my around her as she readied to cry.

But then she opened her mouth and it stayed open, a small little O, but no words came out. No dry tears even. She just rattled, like something invisible was shaking her.

I tried to pull her close, but I couldn't touch her without getting jolted. At that point it was more unreal than scary, which is strange because at this point I can't think of anything scarier than watching your girlfriend tremble like a leaf in the rain.

By the time the ambulance arrived, she was lying motionless on the ground, so stiff that I couldn't carry her even though she was as tiny as a bee.

When she opened her eyes, she called me a liar. She looked pale under the hospital lights but there was something fierce lurking behind her eyes. She then asked me to leave. When I told her I'd come back when she was less upset, she said "you heard the wind, but you wanted me to die."

The Christmas that followed, a little more than six months since the hospital room accusation, I got a card from her, clearly drawn with an unsteady hand. She had made snow men and children; all of them wore identical blue mufflers. The snow men looked like their hats were about to fly away. For someone whose drawing was that childlike, the depiction of a strong gale was spot on.

She's lying face down on the bed. I can almost see tremors running up and down her back. Her skin looks washed out. Someone forgot to mix the right colours before painting her. She doesn't know I am here.

I walk over and stand next to her. "I can start if you're ready." I say. She turns her face to me and I see bags under her eyes. They are dark blue, nothing like anything I have seen before. But her eyes are dry and steady, they look at me and through me with the kind of determination that comes with having been down too long.

"Do we speak first? How does this work?" She asks.

"It's really up to you."

"What would you do if you were in my place?"

"I really can't say. It's different for everyone."

"Yes. Which is why I asked about you."

"I wouldn't be able to talk to someone who I have met for all of two minutes" I say and turn to put on latex gloves that smell strange.

She rolls over and lies on her back. She's thin, but has a bloated stomach. It looks diseased, a festering tumor or something as morbid. She looks at me looking at her.

"I have been on medicines for it." She says and runs her fingers over the bump. There's something peculiar about the way she touches it. It isn't how a woman touches her pregnant stomach. It isn't fear or concern. The closest you could come to making a comparison is if you saw a half naked touching a snail in his backyard; repulsed but curious.

"You've mentioned that to our doctor, right?"
 She nods.

"Should I start?" I ask and take a deep breath.

"I guess I won't speak then." She says and rolls onto her front.

When I touch her, there is a small cry. Like a bird. "It hurts." "It's meant to."

Then there is silence. She is asleep for a couple of hours. When she wakes up, I am sitting by the side, reading the newspaper. The gloves are discarded in a bin nearby.

"I feel different." She says and sits up.

"Good, it's working then."

"My friend said that after she was done, meaning done with the whole course, she felt a lot lighter. Like something was lifted off her chest. Will I feel the same way?"

"You may or may not. It's all really how you interpret it. You came to us because you were guilty of something. You strongly felt you deserved punishment. We just do the enabling. When it's done, you might feel better. But you might not."

" You mean I may feel worse?" She sounds mildly alarmed.

"Not worse necessarily, but not better. Some of the people who come here end up feeling really disgruntled. They feel that penance in general doesn't help anything. Didn't your friend tell you this? I was informed that you didn't need any briefing."

"What do you mean penance in general?"

"Say you are a ten year old. And you forgot to water the plants while your parents were on vacation. And the plants died. And to teach you a lesson, your parents burnt all your books. You obviously will remember to water plants the next time because of the scarring punishment, but you develop a feeling of hatred towards your parents because while the punishment fit the crime, it was misguided and the books you loved so much are now gone."

"So, it wasn't my reading that caused my carelessness towards the plants."

"Yes. Hence the anger."

"I might end up feeling like that at the end of this."

"You can stop now. We're only halfway through."

"No. I'll go with it. Some punishment is better than no punishment."

Then she falls asleep again.

I leave the room and lock it behind me. When she wakes up, she'll be alone. By the time, it kicks in, I'll be home watching TV, oblivious to the thought of retching sounds inside the room with white walls. The memory of this woman and her innards coiling and re coiling will be put away as I fall asleep under my pale blue sheets.

My grandfather once told me a story about his friend. His friend worked as a paramedic during the war. He told my grandfather that strength isn't holding a patient's hand as he dies. It isn't saying something comforting to the bereaved while you are in shock yourself. It is when you can order spaghetti at a roadside restaurant and eat the bean sauce without picturing brains that spilled out of the soldier's head earlier that day. And if in that case strength means indifference, then so be it.

At the edge of a field, we are sitting cross legged in the grass. Our backs are hunched and our faces are caked with a day's worth of grime. We are too tired to sleep. We are too wiped out to talk. We have just enough in us to sit by each other under the sky and look at it. We let our thoughts take over and soon enough, eyes wide open, we lie on our backs.

In the morning, we wash our faces with water that smells of metal. Our smiles are sparkling clean. We leave like thieves, quick and light footed. After a bit, our pace drops and we trudge along. Our footprints in the soil are fleeting, they look real for a bit and disappear under a gust of wind. 

By noon, we are barely recognizable. We are two little dots against the bare expanse of a rural town. We have no place to be and no place to stay. Observed from a distance, we have covered some distance but we haven't reached anywhere at all. 

By night, we are gone. We were never there. And that can't be argued because nobody saw us. We were our only alibis and we aren't there to confirm it. 

The moon is beautiful tonight.

It's wrapped up in its enigma, a halo and a yellow-and-white overcoat. When I walk home I look up at it and it holds my attention. It lends itself easily to poetry. Or to something that is special. A thought, a feeling, a memory of a time when you fell asleep in the moonlight, your fingers laced through another set of fingers. 

I wait and look at it for a few minutes. The houses are all quiet. The people are pursuing their night-time activities in silence. 

There's just me and it's an interesting moment, of being alone and insignificant yet one with a sudden surge of hope about everything.